A spooky pastime?: If it is, Ricky Allred’s got company

He wanders among the markers, reading the names and dates and epitaphs chiseled in stone, and wondering about the lives of those resting in peace.

Allred’s fascination with graveyards began when his father took him to visit the gravesite of an ancestor when he was a boy. While he was indulging this curiosity on a lunchtime walk through the Old City Cemetery in downtown Asheboro a few years back, an unusual headstone caught his eye.

The tall monument bears the name Preston. Allred was surprised to see that the two people buried there — Leonard and Mullie Preston, a couple married just nine months earlier, according to the footstone — had both died on Sept. 23, 1914. He began a search for the rest of the story.

He scoured old records and newspaper accounts and discovered that the Prestons had been killed when their car collided with a train near Mebane. He even visited the site of the crash. They were buried in Asheboro because that’s where Mullie’s family, the Rushes, lived.

When an account of his research was published in The Courier-Tribune, someone asked if he’d share the story — and other tidbits of local history he’d uncovered — in a graveyard gathering.

He agreed and since the summer of 2008 has led periodic walks, typically in the Spring and Fall, through the cemetery that is bounded by Salisbury, Ward and White Oak streets. He calls the treks a “Walk Thru the Past” and promises to introduce people to business, political and religious leaders who “reside” in the cemetery, as well as “regular folk” about whom they might not otherwise hear. The programs are popular.

“I can’t tell you how many times somebody’s said, ‘I’m glad to find out I’m not the only one,’ ” he says.

The south end of the graveyard served as the burial ground for a succession of Methodist churches that stood there in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When the most recent (now First United Methodist) church relocated about a block to the east, Allred says, city officials bought more property to establish a city cemetery.

The oldest readable marker Allred has found is beneath a cedar tree on the southern end of the cemetery. A boy who died in 1843 is buried there; his mother was the granddaughter of Col. Andrew Balfour, a patriot killed in Randolph County during the Revolutionary War.

Allred’s ramblings through the graveyard — and through archives near and far — have resurrected stories about the life and times, and deaths, untimely and otherwise, of dozens of the dearly departed. He figures that he will not soon run out of prospects to research; there are some 1,300 headstones in the cemetery.

Many communities boast a spooky tale or two and ghost stories linked to graveyards are not uncommon. Allred takes such stories with a grain of salt.

“Most of the people you put out there stay where you put them,” he says.

And he adds: “Cemeteries are not a good location to find a haunting. Apparently, the theory is spirits want to hang out where they lived.”

Many who attend “Walk Thru the Past” presentations share tales they’ve heard about “haints” in and around Asheboro. Among the ones Allred has heard: A local funeral home is haunted by its founder — and a crew rehabbing a downtown building a couple of years ago had encounters with a female “spirit” on more than one occasion.

More than one person has told him a legend that pertains to a striking monument in the city cemetery. The weathered marble statue of a young woman carrying a basket of flowers stands on a granite base. It marks the final resting place of Addie Elise McAlister, who was 18 at her death in 1899.

Allred’s research reveals that McAlister was a student at Presbyterian Female College (now Queens University of Charlotte) when she contracted a fever and died a few weeks later. Her father was Lt. Col. Alexander McAlister, a prominent Asheboro resident. The family lived in a Worth Street home (on the spot where the public library stands today) that had been built by McAlister’s father-in-law, Dr. John Milton Worth, in the mid-1800s.

Following her funeral at the Asheboro Presbyterian Church, which stood on Worth Street where the building that houses the Register of Deeds stands, a throng of young people led a large procession to the cemetery, where McAlister’s grave was lined with flowers.

The statue’s right hand is missing.

Allred has not found anyone who knows when or how the hand was broken off, but the legend involving the hand dates back several decades — to the childhoods of the adults who told him the tale — so it has been gone for quite a while.

Legend has it that on Halloween, at the stroke of midnight, the statue stirs to life and the young woman looks around, trying to find her hand.

Allred has never visited the cemetery on Halloween to check out the story and has no plans to do so. He says that it would be dark at the witching hour, making it difficult to see what is etched onto the stones.

“I’m more interested in what I can read,” he says, smiling.

Besides, someone apparently has done this bit of research for him.

“I had one person tell me they went out there at Halloween,” Allred says, “and she didn’t move.”